


As a Hen Gathers Her Brood

by ShitpostingfromtheBarricade



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Chillingworth!Marguerite, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Hester!Fantine, Marguerite PoV, Story within a Story, Victurnien can GET WRECKED, a story of RESENTMENT TOWARD SOCIETY, alternate universe - The Scarlet Letter (book) fusion, lesmisbigbang2020, quarantinebigbang, uncited biblical quotations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:20:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24015097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShitpostingfromtheBarricade/pseuds/ShitpostingfromtheBarricade
Summary: It was a day like any other when Marguerite made her decision.A Scarlet Letter AU.Warnings:none
Relationships: Fantine & Marguerite (Les Misérables)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13





	As a Hen Gathers Her Brood

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the Les Mis Big Bang: Quarantine Edition prompt, melody - silhouette - scarlet - distance 
> 
> Thanks as always to [PieceOfCait](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PieceOfCait/pseuds/PieceOfCait), and additional thanks to [CivilizedRevolution](https://archiveofourown.org/users/civilizedrevolutionary/profile) for helping me with the syntax!

It was a day like any other when Marguerite made her decision.

Fantine had been sitting on the austere bench in front of the window as always. Marguerite must have told her one thousand times that it does no good for her stitching to have the light at her back like that, but Fantine had answered one thousand one times that picking stitching is much easier with the sun’s warmth to see her through it.

Between them, little Cosette played on the threadbare rug that had been a wedding gift to Marguerite decades before.

For all of her years of experience, Marguerite’s hands were growing as old and tired as the rest of her, and Fantine’s were still fresh and nimble. The younger woman still found a certain pleasure in her work, humming as she toiled, where Marguerite’s mind grew weary from lack of conversation.

“Fantine,” she interrupted, “where did you learn that melody?”

“Hm?” Her hands had paused at her work when she looked up, as though she had forgotten that there was anyone else in the room. “Oh. A tune we used to sing in my hometown.”

“Your family,” Marguerite concluded. It was a folk tune, unfamiliar to her but with all of the trappings anyone would recognize as belonging to one.

Fantine had hesitated again at her stitching before smiling. “Marguerite, I wonder if I ever told you...”

The tease. “Told me what?”

“I never knew my mother or father.”

She had not. “You have not.”

“Well there, now I have.”

“Who raised you then?”

“Oh,” Fantine had said wistfully, eyes falling back to the embroidery in her lap, “whoever saw little Fantine and took pity on her.”

“Surely the church knew.”

“There was no church.”

“Heavens! How did you receive your name?”

“Like water from clouds on my forehead when it rained. Someone once called me ‘Fantine,’ and so ‘Fantine’ I became.”

“But someone must have looked after you?”

Fantine had hummed again at that, a tuneless and winding thing that was merry nonetheless.

It had always been the same with Fantine, then: passed from one unwilling party to the next, no one to take care of her. She had come to this distant new world alone as well, and when yet another family had shoved her to the side she made her own company in Cosette.

This moral failing, the want for company, had not been lost on their puritanical community, and Fantine had been made to suffer for being a mother abandoned by the father.

“By the way, what was his name?”

“Whose name?” 

“The father’s. You were asked before, but —”

“But it matters not now,” Fantine had sighed. “His name was Félix.” 

Marguerite’s eyes narrowed. “He will not be joining you.”

“No.”

“Did you receive word of this?”

“Even if I did, I do not know my letters, and you are my only confidante.”

She nodded: even Marguerite knew only enough to sign her name. The contents of such a letter would not be wise to share with another of their community. “How do you know, then?”

“It has been more than three years.”

“Then he will see no retribution.”

Fantine’s eyes had flitted up to meet Marguerite’s before returning to the needlework. “If the good reverend is to be believed, life has a day after. It is not my duty to torture myself in the name of another’s justice.”

“No, surely that is the duty of the townspeople.”

“Marguerite!” Fantine had exclaimed, sounding more delighted than admonishing. 

Marguerite shrugged. She was old: years of piety had earned her the right to say so. Between them, the doll that Marguerite had made and Fantine had ornamented for Cosette beheaded a fly with a lead sword. “Do you not begrudge him?”

“No more than I begrudge the sun for burning my skin, nor the rain for soddening my clothes.”

Marguerite begrudged the sun and rain deeply for both of these things. 

“And how can I regret Félix,” Fantine had continued, “when it is through him that I have my little Cosette?” She looked adoringly on the toddler giggling at her feet. “It is through his inaction that I am alone, no act of malevolence.”

“Is inaction not a sin in its own right? ‘So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.’”

“‘You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.’” Laughing gently, Fantine had paused to shake her head before returning to her stitching. “I will not speak for nor act in His name except where it can be done in kindness and my ignorance forgiven. I have Cosette, and I have you: I want for nothing else.”

“Cosette grows fussy and unruly with no playmates,” warned Marguerite. “The church may try to see her taken away. And I am no spring chicken.”

“Are you not?” A playful spark glinted in Fantine's eyes. “The way you cluck your tongue after me, I thought myself one of your hatchlings.”

The squawk Marguerite made in answer hardly helped her point. “‘Stand up in the presence of the elderly,’” she quoted pointedly, “‘and show respect for the aged.’”

“And what does the good book have to say on poultry, my good mother hen?”

“That they should pick their brood with great care and allow the rest to starve.”

“Not very Christian.”

“No, but certainly puritanical.”

Fantine’s smile had waned then, pearls sheathing themselves once more inside their mantle. “It is not so bad,” she had repeated. “I am happy.”

“It is a sin.”

“To feel joy?”

“To shame it. My husband and I, God rest his soul, came here to build longer tables, not taller walls.” Marguerite’s head gave a disdainful shake. “Disgraceful.”

“Why Marguerite, that sounds near to heresy,” the other woman had commented conspiratorially, a diminutive curl to her lips as her eyes remained trained to her stitchwork. 

“If it is heresy to want justice in our congregation, then let me be damned.”

Against all odds, it had encouraged a giggle from Fantine, and not for the first time Marguerite was reminded of the companionship the young mother had been robbed of, a collection of young girls her age with whom to titter and tease and gossip.

In all this time the daylight had quite gotten away from her, and Marguerite had been surprised to see Fantine tucking away her work and rose to her feet. “Leaving so soon?”

“Why, my dear mother hen, the sun is already low in the sky." A capricious smile played at her mouth as she regarded her child. “Come now, Cosette, we must be getting home.” 

In the gleaming beams of golden hour Fantine had been silhouetted in the window, reduced to naught but a shadow and the gold-edged outline on her chest as it caught the final shimmering rays that daylight had to offer. Disgust roiled in Marguerite’s stomach to see Fantine through the eyes of the townspeople: a woman and a letter.

Putting down her own stitching to see the two off, Marguerite crossed her arms over her chest as she watched the Madonna and child return to their rudimentary quarters. Outside of her own ascetic walls Fantine’s hair shone resplendent under her cap, cheeks rosy as she encouraged the child in her arms to wave. Her joy had long since outgrown herself and her sorrows, yet there was a quiet underlying dignity and beauty that Marguerite knew the other women of the village had watched with envy during Fantine’s public exposure all those many months ago.

The light had been too low in the house by the time she returned to continue her work, so Marguerite had lit a candle and began getting dressed to go to bed for the night—only, once she had lay down, she had found that her thoughts were not so ready to rest.

So Fantine was happy: that was fine. Perhaps she would keep her child, and perhaps little Cosette would be happy as well. Félix would still be out there terrorizing the livelihoods of other young and beautiful women less resilient than Fantine without a thimble’s worth of justice to slow him.

On this matter, however, Fantine had also spoken truly: Félix was not there to cause her any more pain, had not been for over three years. No, every hardship wrought since her arrival to the new world had been brought upon her by none other than the congregation itself, rotting and crumbling at its core. 

Once the pieces came together it had been an easy enough decision to make, and within the rise and fall of three suns Marguerite had had a plan.

It had been simple enough to procure the proper vestments and an exercise in patience to discover the daily routines of the village’s various goodwives and goodmen, every one more guilty than the last in Fantine’s suffering. At first she had worried over knowing where to begin, but as the plan began to assemble so too did the answer reveal itself, plain as the scarlet letter splashed bright across her young ward’s bosom.

“Good evening, Goody Victurnien,” Marguerite whispers in the night, face shrouded as she looms over the widow’s resting form. “God knows what you did that winter. He knows, and he is not pleased.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this, please leave a comment below or reach out to me at my [tumblr](http://shitpostingfromthebarricade.tumblr.com)!!
> 
> (No really, I live for your comments.)


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